decent silence, as if further comment were needless.

Happily there are some who feel such Levitical passing-by to be,
alas, by no means a permanent dismissal of the matter; that comment
on where the world stands is very much the reverse of needless in
these disordered years of our prematurely afflicted century: that
amendment and not madness lies that way. And looking down the future
these few hold fast to the same: that whether the human and kindred
animal races survive till the exhaustion or destruction of the globe,
or whether these races perish and are succeeded by others before that
conclusion comes, pain to all upon it, tongued or dumb, shall be kept
down to a minimum by lovingkindness, operating through scientific
knowledge, and actuated by the modicum of free will conjecturally
possessed by organic life when the mighty necessitating forces--
unconscious or other--that have "the balancings of the clouds,"
happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may not be often.

To conclude this question I may add that the argument of the so-
called optimists is neatly summarized in a stern pronouncement
against me by my friend Mr. Frederic Harrison in a late essay of his,
in the words: "This view of life is not mine." The solemn
declaration does not seem to me to be so annihilating to the said
"view" (really a series of fugitive impressions which I have never
tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently assumed. Surely it embodies
a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic. Next, a knowing
reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man, speaks, with some
rather gross instances of the suggestio falsi in his article, of "Mr.
Hardy refusing consolation," the "dark gravity of his ideas," and so
on. When a Positivist and a Catholic agree there must be something
wonderful in it, which should make a poet sit up. But . . . O that